Instead of paying adults more, states let companies hire kids for labor shortage

I get your point. But the example doesn’t look convincing. If you’re comfortable with eating meat you should be comfortable with seeing how it’s made.

Question is, do we have the right safety in place, are they being overworked and are they mentally mature enough.

Kids are likely okay in many opportunities but not okay in others and someone should be figuring this out.

As long as we have the right safeguards in place, I think it’s okay.

Being able to work as a kid helped me immensely.

Now the work introduced here has nothing to do with knowledge work, and it just takes away time from building a carreer, so of course I’m against that kind of child labor.

I wonder if the new term is the industry pushing for a euphemism as a PR move?

You know what the true subtext is?

They are doing this to allow all the child migrants to work without issue. That entire child labor pool that is growing rapidly to the point Hyundai is spinning off subsidiary only to reduce the blame on themselves, they are still keeping the supplier.

Calling bad stuff "feudalism" is extremely tiresome as well as showing ignorance. It's unfortunate you have to muddy-up an otherwise OK rant/summary with this confused terminology.

Conventional agricultural labor on the land wasn't easy but it extraordinarily different from low-paid factor labor. This a return to Factory Capitalism Classic, which was a new system in most places starting in early 19th century. Peasant children might well have worked along side their parents in the fields at times and the work might have been back-breaking at times but the growing season then dictated everyone got substantial time off by virtue of there being nothing to do. Factories, mines and workshops were the first places that could impose relentless 18 hour days because they the organization, technologies and market to do that.

So the mistake was letting women out of the kitchen.

This has been a known thing, an upcoming problem for decades. Everyone knew this was coming. Everyone.

Canada is trying to get out of this hole (the fact that there are 1.4 births per two Canadians), the "population collapse" hole, via immigration, with 500k immigrants per year.

That would be like 5M immigrants per year in the US.

For a comparison, due to the 1 child policy, China's population will halve before 2035.

China is in very, very serious trouble. The entire West is too, but China's trouble will be far worse. Japan keeps building robots, and mechanized walk-assist devices.

There was no "great resignation", simply a well known "great retirement".

Now, should people be paid a decent wage? Of course!! But that won't change this problem one bit, as there are simply not enough working age adults.

And to highlight this, not only do retirees reduce thr number of candidates available for work, they also require more care. Health care, end of life care, nursing homes.

Heck, expecting an independent 70 year old to shingle a roof, something a cash strapped 30 year old might engage in, is far less likely.

So a "too heavy" society is a major issue. And we knew it was coming, for decades, and did not resolve the issue.

For additional clarity, the world will be at about 5 billion at 2040, without war or plague.

This is an extremely solipsistic take if you actually believe it.

Rather than writing everyone off a Just That Dumb(TM), perhaps the really neat trick has been to convince a sufficient proportion of people that their salary depends somehow on carefully not understanding "living wages" and "rising wealth inequality is a problem" and "the planetary ecosystem is in bad shape".

Disclaimer: for my own part I certainly have a substantial amount of decidedly uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between "I want a nice comfy life" and "I'm literally part of this problem, aren't I?". From the outside I probably seem like just another zombie to some people.

Ironically, although that quote is by Upton Sinclair, it is not from The Jungle, which concerns the meat packing industry.

> yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom. If we end up reinventing old things from first principles, that means we have all the more confidence in them, rather than relying on the unalive momentum of tradition and path dependence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118384

From my exposure to the political right, they've been preoccupied with CRT, drag queen story hour, and censorship. Occasionally immigration pops up, but politicians even on the right prefer to ignore that (as any graph of immigration to the US vs. which party is in power will show).

I haven't seen even a hint of a grassroots campaign against child labor restrictions - or any kind of campaign at all, just bills suddenly appearing out of the blue. This is strictly a top-down push, not even from the politicians, but their puppet-masters. They're banking on voters' loyalty and lack of alternatives to not lose any votes.

If there's a lesson we forgot, it's how to limit corruption in politics, not that maybe child labor is OK.

2) The investor class isn't allow to steal all the profits and live like modern kings.

At least in the midwest two major things are pushing for more exploitive childhood labor...

First, much better treatment of the handicapped and access to abortions where defects are detectable in the womb.

and Secondly, the entire Trump administrations 'build a bigger wall' had dramatically dropped border crossings at least up until the year 2019.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/09/us/the-boys-i...

I wouldn’t want to subsidize some company’s low wages by lending them my kid at a discount rate, but that’s just me.

It is a founding myth of the USA that regular people can work labor jobs and have a home and pay for raising children. This happy make-believe has lasted for a while in a few places. It regularly comes apart at the seams, as we are seeing now.

Secondly, many commentators here do not understand that addictive, forced and "no win" products, conditions and living places are the reality for many poor people. Money comes and goes. Watch some non-fiction YouTube about daily life in barrios, coastal South East Asian places, or immigrants in large cities.

edit maybe an additional distinction for context. The British-led industrial revolution started a new series of labor-employer relations.. where, instead of individual workers making one farm or one shoe repair, a set of people could work shifts in an industrial setting, then the goods produced makes a large surplus. The rewards of that surplus allegedly are split, where workers are paid enough to buy them and improve their living. The article here is not about a middle-class high school kid making extra money, it is about fueling industrial work sites with labor from under-18 people, perhaps full-time and perhaps under dangerous conditions, and perhaps with little-to-no transferable skill. This kind of labor is also gamed by middlemen via contracts, deceptive reporting, intimidation and the like.

It seems obvious that more than half the commentators here have no experience with forced or abusive work sites.

This isn't about that, though. This is about artificially creating a supply of workers by lowering standards, rather than increasing the price for the existing supply of workers.

With a looming demographic bomb looming at the horizon we need to value existing workers more and increase individual productivity rather than removing child protection or workplace safety regulations. Spare time jobs aside, children are the workers of tomorrow -- not means to short-term value for shareholders.

Now imagine if they didn't have to pay you as much as you were paid, if they didn't have to keep you safe, if you were responsible for injuries on the job, or if you were working in a meat-packing plant where injuries like lost fingers are relatively common.

I don't think anyone is arguing that teenagers should not be allowed to work, but rather that they, like all workers, should be offered protections and reasonable wages if they do choose to work.

I say this as someone who also worked at 14.

By travelling around, I was surprised by the non-sense and the lack of efficiency of the economy in some countries.

In some places that are 'developing', citizens were working as hard of harder than in wealthy places. But most of them were in non-productive jobs, like security agents to just guard a few houses, tricycle driver (when ppl could just walk), train platform monitor (in the Philippines, I was annoyed because there was someone at every platform, like a lifeguard in a swimming pool, but to make sure you weren't stepping to close to the edge),...

Often, workers are even trapped in cheap labour ! Western companies outsource in some places just because it's cheaper, and hire nothing but unqualified workers as long as they accept low wages. These branches would never hire qualified workers or uni graduates, because they're just there for the low wages.

So we need to increase the salaries, and make sure children have access to education and better jobs.

Also, "it just ensures the ones that can't afford to do that go bankrupt" is just basic capitalism and market economy. They been pushing that on us for decades. According to the media, it was the only alternative, and the key to a better world.

Why would that be different, when the market conditions impose a better wage ?

Why are the republicans suddenly moving the goalposts ? Do they mean they were wrong ?

As they should. If you can't pay for the labour you don't have a business.

Having children compete with adults in the market is going as far backwards as possible, leading to the US--what should be a very rich nation--to start utilizing Chinese and rural India manufacturing ideologies.

It's funny how we just keep rehashing the same issues and abuses over the last 200 years.

This is about how allowing kids to work will require your children to work to support the average family.

They can in a vast majority of cases, there are just more restrictions to ensure they aren't being exploited by businesses (hours, inherent danger of the jobs, acknowledging that a 14 year old is still a bloody child, etc). Those restrictions are being removed.

Children should not have full-time jobs, nor should they compete with the adults in the job market.

Period.

That was never the plan.

Turns out you can enjoy a pretty excessive lifestyle on the cost of exploiting your population. If you can keep them at bay physically (overtime) and financially (living wage) you might as well keep doing this forever. What are they gonna do? Protest during the 8 free hours they got a day? Run for any significant political position with the 2 dollars left from their living wage?

Of course children from minorities could have a future but why care about that when you're well off?

What if approaching neo-feudalism was the goal, not a side effect?

Invoking your own anecdote of laid-back summer jobs with total disregard of what's actually happening with these child labour law changes just shows you had a privileged childhood and you are unaware of how not everyone could afford the same privileges as you.

Pretending otherwise to make a precious point is absurd. You know it.

Work is inherently exploitative. A parent-child relationship is not (most of the time. I know exceptions exists). That's why it doesn't make any sense to compare work and housework.